Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Tuesday October 19, 2010 @08:36AM
from the still-rich dept.

digitaldc writes "Here's a full transcript of the interview with John Sculley on the subject of Steve Jobs. It's long but worth reading because there are some awesome insights into how Jobs does things. It's also one of the frankest CEO interviews you'll ever read. Sculley talks openly about Jobs and Apple, admits it was a mistake to hire him to run the company and that he knows little about computers. It's rare for anyone, never mind a big-time CEO, to make such frank assessment of their career in public."

I never quite got why so many people are allergic to command lines. The greatest revolution in the web was reintroducing the command line in the form of the search bar. You can see search based interfaces on everything today including Windows 7 and iOS. Linux systems today are also auto-configuring to such a large extent I seldom have to configure anything at all. I still remember when I had to manually generate the X11 configuration. Today X11 automatically detects everything on startup, from your keyboard, to your graphics card, to your monitor. It also manages to do this with a much wider spectrum of hardware then the small sample MacOS X needs to deal with.

I remember working on a kernel extension for OS X on a previous job 5 or 6 years ago. We were having some trouble, so we started digging through the XNU source code. We found an email address of an engineer at apple in some of the comments and emailed him. After a few emails it was determined there was a bug (we were doing something rather strange, so this wouldn't normally affect developers), he offered a work around and opened a bug report for the issue. This wouldn't have happened had I been developing for windows.

Why does every single discussion about Apple on Slashdot has to be so polarized?Why don't you make any effort to understand why nerds could like Apple products?

I'm a nerd, and I like my Mac Mini because:* it doesn't consume much power* Lightroom/Photoshop work flawlessly* Portal/Counter Strike work* I have access to a yakuake-like terminal, and I can administrate my Linux servers with ssh+zsh+vim without having to install any third party app on my client. Last time I tried, cygwin & putty terminals on Windows were close to unusable in comparison.* I know how to build a computer from scratch, install any Linux flavor on it with virtual machines in order to be able to do all the above. Been there, done that, but sometimes I want to get things done instead of experimenting with yet another setup.* If I want to feel good, I go write some bug reports for Ubuntu or answer newbie questions on forums.

See? I suppose those points could be valuable for nerds, and I didn't mention any "ooooohh, shiny!" factor.

I love command lines, which is why I love the OSX terminal. Two sentences on from the line you quote I mention that as an advantage. It's great that I can script stuff in Bash and Perl when the GUI tools seem too limited. Note that in most (nearly all) cases though, when I open the terminal to do something, I *could* have done it in the GUI. It was just quicker or more elegant to use the CLI. That's critical because most people wouldn't know how to do it in the CLI.

The one instance I've *ever* encountered on a Mac (sibling mentions another, but I've not encountered that particular issue) where I absolutely *had* to use the CLI was manually upgrading the virus definition file in McAfee for Mac. This situation was incredibly edge case. The system was Classified so it couldn't be connected to the Internet, but also needed up to date virus definitions (Yay for pointless regulation, completely isolated systems get viruses all the time amirite?). I had to use the command line to change the McAfee config file from binary to XML, edit the line that pointed at the current definitions files, then change it back to binary and restart the scanner. Not something a "normal" user is *ever* likely to have to do. Also this was a third party software issue, not an actual "Mac" issue.

Linux systems today are also auto-configuring to such a large extent I seldom have to configure anything at all. I still remember when I had to manually generate the X11 configuration. Today X11 automatically detects everything on startup, from your keyboard, to your graphics card, to your monitor. It also manages to do this with a much wider spectrum of hardware then the small sample MacOS X needs to deal with.

Hardly ever is not never. Don't get me wrong, GUI tools and automatic systems on Linux have come a *long* way. It remains the case though that they still fail in a non-trivial number of instances. Just a week or two ago I discovered that you have to manually edit xorg.conf to get dual Display Port monitors working, at least in Red Hat. They do work fine, which is awful nice (and a huge improvement in itself, I still remember when every hardware purchase had to vetted against what worked, what didn't work, and what might work with tweaking), but not without some manual tweaks.

The other problem with Linux admin tools is that they tend to be written as what they are: front ends to a CLI interface. Open the network tool on a Mac and a Linux box. They do mostly the same things, but the Mac tool talks in terms of what the user wants to do. It gives you obvious interface names like "Wireless", "Bluetooth", and "Firewire" (assuming your Mac is oldish like mine). The Linux tools talks in terms that make sense to someone who usually does this stuff on the command line. Interfaces are listed by eth number and you have to know whether eth0 is your wireless card or your wired card. Now if you look at the command line, Mac interfaces look just like Linux interfaces (cme# instead of eth#, but whatever), and ifconfig works the same way, but for the "normal" users the Mac GUI is designed better.

- When Sculley says it was a mistake to hire "him" - he means it was a mistake to hire Sculley- Sculley doesn't diss on Steve Jobs in the interview.- The whole interview is a love poem about Jobs by Sculley.